Splitting The Adam

 

It doesn't matter that few in politics share my concerns, because I'm still in good company:

"David Colquhoun, professor of pharmacology at University College London for 30 years, has lately led a double life. In his day job, he has pioneered painstaking research into the binding properties of molecules and contributed extensively to understanding the particular influences on ion channel function in the development of drugs. In his after-hours alter ego, however, he is the take-no-prisoners scourge of quackery and mumbo-jumbo in his unmissable blog, DC's Improbable Science. 

For a decade or more, no homeopath or acupuncturist has been safe from Professor Colquhoun's scathing, and often comic, online analysis. No newspaper report of the latest carcinogen – sausages or coffee or cheese – can survive his statistical scrutiny. He wages rigorous war against the march of managerialism and corporate speak through academia and the NHS. And, at 76, you would have to say he rather enjoys it."

 I'll take these professors - over any of the others I know - any day,...

 

Oh, Man, France Really Isn't Going To Like This*

"The whole field is messy, vague, inaccurate and entirely dependent on the goodwill or ignorance of patients for any positive results. At best it’s a harmless placebo, at worst it’s a despicable, cynical, potentially deadly confidence trick played on the sick."

-- Ian Douglas, reporting on Professor David Colquhoun's magnificent new series about newly-released documents from a "Homeopathy 'degree' course" taught at the University of Central Lancashire - the course (along with almost all of the rest of its "alternative" medicine courses) has since been closed - revealing some of the more craven, "absurd and dangerous" aspects of what many laughingly call "woo-woo", in The Telegraph, U.K..

*The French use Homeopathic preparations at a rate of 4 to 1. My marriage, to a French woman, was destroyed because of Homeopathy.

The Dilution Of Homeopathy Has Begun

"The campaign against the [NewAge] remedies has had a particular impact on homeopathic medicines, which have been available through the NHS since the health system started in 1948. Prescriptions dropped almost in half to 49,300 in 2007 from 2004, and costs declined to 321,300 pounds from 661,400 pounds, according to NHS Business Services Authority statistics.

'It’s the easiest target -- the medicine that contains no medicine,' said David Colquhoun, a University College London pharmacology professor who writes a blog on what he calls 'dubious and dishonest science.'

Colquhoun said a favorite homeopathic dilution level is so thin that you would need a pill the size of the distance from the earth to the sun to get even a single molecule of the original substance.

...The criticism also has hurt the funding of the country’s five homeopathic hospitals, which had a combined budget of about 6 million pounds a year,...

Royal London Homeopathic’s income from local health authorities dropped 28 percent to 3.5 million pounds in the fiscal year ended in April,...One north London health authority, Brent Teaching Primary Care Trust, ended a contract with the hospital in 2006, saying 'there is insufficient evidence' for the care.

The NHS homeopathic hospital in Tunbridge Wells, south of London, lost its biggest sponsor in July and may close when funding runs out in March."

-- David Altaner and Andrea Gerlin, showing skepticism "works" more effectively than alternative medicine, on Bloomberg.com.

And Then Some

"A romp through almost every form of battiness known to humankind."

-- David Colquhoun, professor of pharmacology at University College London, on reviewing a new list of colleges handing out bogus degrees in "alternative medicine". As reported in The Daily Mail.

Drink Up!

"It's completely nuts,...[It's like] if you want to get really drunk you dilute your beer in Lake Superior. Who could possibly believe that?"

- David Colquhoun, professor of pharmacology at University College London and a fellow of The Royal Society, on homeopathy.